Did Chai Lifeline, the haredi charity that provides summer camps and outings for (primarily) haredi and Orthodox kids sick with cancer and other life-threatening diseases, essentially steal almost $1 million from a donor?
Did Chai Lifeline Misuse Almost $1 Million?
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
Did Chai Lifeline, the haredi charity that provides summer camps and outings for (primarily) haredi and Orthodox kids sick with cancer and other life-threatening diseases, essentially steal almost $1 million from a donor?
Harvey Bookman, a multimillionaire retired investor who lives in Brooklyn, says he has given Chai Lifeline millions for its Catskills camp. But Bookman told the New York Post that a $900,000 contribution he gave Chai Lifeline in 2012 to build the camp a sewer appears to have misappropriated, and Bookman wants a full accounting – or his money back.
“I gave them $900,000 more than two years ago — after they knew the type, size and price of the sewer — and they still have not begun construction,” Bookman reportedly said. He reported Chai Lifeline to the New York State Attorney General’s Office in November 2013.
Bookman started donating to Chai Lifeline 12 years ago and says he eventually he became its biggest donor. When Chai Lifeline was teetering on bankruptcy in 2009, Bookman bailed it out with more than $1 million.
In October 2012, Chai Lifeline’s development director wrote in an email obtained by the Post that Bookman “wants any additional funds over the $1 million that he donated this year or may donate going forward to be set aside for building a new sewer system in [Chai Lifeline’s] Camp Simcha.”
But when Bookman repeatedly asked Chai Lifelines’s directors the next year what happened to the cash he gave them and about the progress of the sewer project, he says he couldn’t get straight answers.
Bookman, who first made his fortune when Oracle Larry Ellison bought his Teckchek testing service in 1998, said he wanted the sewer system named after himself as a kind of tongue-in-cheek joke. He also said Chai Lifeline refused a multimillion-dollar contribution from him that would have been predicated on naming the whole charity after him.
Chai Lifeline claims the sewer project has been in the planning stages for almost two years and has to go through a state review process. It also claims construction is scheduled to begin in March.
Chai Lifeline also claims that Bookman’s $900,000 gift was not restricted to the new septic system. However, the email from Chai Lifeline’s director of development would seem to dispute that.
Stu Loeser, Chai Lifeline’s spokesman, but said Chai Lifeline still has Bookman’s money. $195,202 of it has been spent on the sewer project, Loeser said, including a deposit for a contractor and paying Chai Lifeline’s own staffers $50,505 for their work on the so far nonexistent sewer.